How to Manage Time in JEE Mains Exam?

Competitive exams are difficult and demand students determined preparation. But, despite their preparation, we often see many students fail to manifest it on their exam day. Ever wondered what could be the reason? It is their lower confidence level and lack of time management skills. When they do not know how to attempt the questions in the given limited time, their confidence level goes down, which results in poor performance.

No student will ever work hard for many months to get bad results, isn’t it? Hence, this article is to help the students out there who are preparing for competitive exams like IIT JEE Main, NEET, AIIMS, etc. Every competitive exam is complex and there are few common and smart strategies to tackle them. Go ahead and read the entire article to know those strategies that will help you in managing your time in the exam.

There are two ways of approaching the question paper. One is the difficulty level approach and the other is the subject-wise approach. Let us discuss each in a detailed manner.

Difficulty-level approach:-

In this approach, as the name itself indicates, you have to start solving the questions according to their difficulty level. Questions that take more than a minute should not be attended at the beginning itself. You must not have an ego problem and take a challenge in your exam hall. This will only kill your time. You must attempt all the easiest ones in the beginning so that you get most of the questions out of your way. Attempt those questions that you are confident about and can finish within a minute. Leave the questions that are most likely to take more than a minute. You can attempt these questions once you are done with the easy ones, that is in your second phase of attempting questions. Here, you may attend the intermediate questions like the tricky wordy problem or little lengthy numerical problem. You must not spend more than three minutes while you are solving the next level questions. Keep all the difficult questions, the who which you have no clue on, to the end. When you are left with only difficult questions, try to solve those questions which are based on the topics that you are familiar with.

Subject-wise approach:-

If you are choosing this method, you need to start answering your favourite or easiest subject section first. For example:- people find Chemistry to be the easiest in NEET exam. Once you are done with the easiest subject, move on to the intermediate subject and at last to the difficult or time-consuming subject like Maths in JEE paper. The main theme is that you get all or at least most of the questions answered before the given time. Hence finish that subject in which you feel confident about and keep the tricky ones to the last. In case even if you run out of time, you will have already answered the easiest ones and misses out the questions that you were not sure of; so that you will not have regrets.

Be it any competitive exam, you can follow one of the above-discussed approaches and tackle the paper well in the given limited time. Make sure you glance at the questions once, before you start solving them. Keep calm and have a positive mindset. Do not panic regardless of how difficult the paper might be. Make the optimum usage of time and give your best shot to get the results of your hard work. Finally, take care of your health and do not study overnight. Have proper sleep and keep yourself hydrated so that your mind will be productive.

All the best for your exams!